Solitude Interrupted
by Ceallaigh Eirinn
Summary: Exiled as a solitary inhabitant on a remote planet following the war, Ben Solo has turned his back on the Force. He feels his mother's passing from millions of light years away but realizes he is not all that alone even in the farthest reaches of space.


Ben Solo had been the sole human residing on Maluhia for a little over a year. A planet orbiting the sun in the Mihi system, one of the few named systems beyond the furthest reaches of the Outer Rim, it was truly in uncharted space. It didn't show up on any star chart by design, its name an artificial construct created by the Old Republic fugitives who sought refuge generations before during a time when darkness spread through the galaxy.

The island he called home was his death sentence, the tribunal had told him. The lake—more of a large inland freshwater sea than anything else—stretched out in all directions and contained him better than any bars or energy fields ever could. They had told him he would die there. Whether it was from his own hand, sickness, an accident or even old age, it didn't matter. He was never leaving Maluhia. Without any means of escaping Ben had accepted his fate long ago. It didn't matter that he had turned against Snoke and helped the Resistance bring the First Order to its knees. He was still Kylo Ren, no matter what name he chose to call himself, and he had still needed to pay for his many war crimes. He'd proven he was not fit to live among others, and they'd found a place to exile him where he wouldn't be a threat to anyone, where a rocky shore had become his prison and a weathered stone cottage was his prison cell.

Ben was heading into his second winter on Maluhia when it hit him, and he couldn't ignore the Force's message. He had turned his back on it shortly after he'd settled into his new existence. He'd used the Force to hurt too many people, and he'd hurt even more trying to bend it to his will. It had been nothing but a source of sorrow and pain for him, and he'd decided to simply cut himself off from it. He didn't need the Force to cast a net in the bay to catch fish or grow vegetables in his small garden. It would never keep him warm when the autumn witches would blow off the lake and coat everything in ice. The Force had never been kind to him, and it was easy enough to leave it behind.

But he couldn't stop the Force from crashing through him. He'd been carrying in an armload of wood into the house when it happened. It had robbed the breath from his chest, and the firewood slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor. Hosnian Prime had been horrible. He never told anyone how he'd heard millions of voices cry out in fear. But it hadn't been the fear that had torn him apart that day. It was the deafening silence in the wake of Starkiller's destruction that clawed at him that day and every day following that after the Order had turned system to ash.

But nothing had prepared him for this. No screams, no pain, no sorrow. Just an all-consuming void where she had once been and the overpowering silence that followed. His mother was gone, and he there was nothing he could do about it.

"Amma," he whispered to no one as grief surrounded him on all sides. Everything hurt.

Ben didn't sleep that night. He allowed inertia to consume him and he didn't do anything at all. His stomach protested its emptiness, but he could not eat. He needed to cry, but his eyes made no tears. The fire in the hearth slowly died, but he couldn't find it in him to rebuild it. He shivered from the cold yet he could not find the energy to wrap himself in the blanket folded on the couch. Instead he sat curled in the oversized chair that looked out at the lake, watching the snow fall from the colorless grey sky until the light faded and that sterile grey yielded to the black of night and back to the grey of morning the next day.

The next night he felt her approach long before she'd made planetfall. Rey wasn't scheduled to return for another six weeks. One of the very small handful that knew where he'd been banished, she was a welcomed visitor every three months or so, delivering supplies as well as letters from his mother. He would read them over and over, sometimes tracing his mother's high Alderanni script with his finger. They had always seemed more intimate and personal than any holo conversation they had ever had over the comm, and now they were the only tangible thing he had left of her. In her last letter, she had made plans to visit him in the spring after the new galactic charter had been ratified and Maluhia's weather would be more hospitable. It would've been her second trip to his prison island, and he had been counting down the days before the buds would open on the trees and she would return.

Rey had become his only other connection to the rest of humanity. Ben marked the change of seasons by her visits. They had forged a friendship during his trial. She'd been the only person aside from his mother that had bothered to visit him while he was imprisoned in the detention center orbiting Chandrila. After arriving on Maluhia that friendship had evolved into something else that he was convinced he didn't deserve. Somewhere along the line, they had become lovers as well, and the galaxy became a little less lonely even if that comfort was rationed out only a few times per year.

Ben was on his feet and out the door, sprinting down the snowy path toward the clearing beside the beach moments before he even saw the Falcon's lights above the silhouette of the spruces. The snow whipped around and stung at his face as the spacecraft came to a rest. He stopped in his tracks, and the ramp descended. Rey ran down it and toward him before it fully touched the ground.

"Tell me it isn't true," he begged, his voice ragged and his eyes alight with unshed tears. He already knew the answer, but it didn't stop him from praying that it was a nothing more than a cruel cosmic joke the Force had been playing on him. "Lie to me and tell me that she's fine."

"I'm so sorry, Ben," was all she could manage to answer.

He let out a wordless cry that echoed out on the frozen lake as he dropped to his knees in the snow and began to sob. Hot, angry tears streaked down both of his cheeks, and all he felt was pain. Soul crushing, suffocating pain.

Rey dropped her carryall and closed the distance between the two of them. "I came as soon as it happened," she added through her own tears. "I didn't want you to be alone right now."

He put up no resistance as she wrapped her arms around him and drew him into her embrace. "I'm sorry," she whispered while his arms circled her waist and he clung to her tightly as he cried. "I'm so sorry."

His mother was dead. He would never see her again. Ben couldn't help think that this twist of fate had always been part of his sentence, that his mother would eventually pass and he would be forced to feel that ripple in the Force millions of light years away, unable to stop it from happening, forbidden to bid his final farewell. It was intentionally vindictive, meticulously planned and undeniably inevitable. It was a heartless wrinkle to his punishment, a little facet of the sanction that no one—not even himself—would remember was even there until it happened. Kylo Ren would have approved of its cruelty.

Maybe the Jedi were the lucky ones after all. By severing connections to those around them and eschewing such base emotions—passion, anger and grief—were they able to excise the sorrow that came with death? Or were they just taught themselves to be that uncaring that they were nothing more than indifferent bastards that refused to emote in their pursuit of purity in the Force?

Where was this ever-powerful life energy now? Why couldn't it have saved his mother? He hated the Force all the more for it. It had rejected him as much as he had turned his back on it.

"There's nothing you could've done, Ben," Rey soothed as she placed a gentle kiss on the top of his head. In moments like this, when his emotions were too raw and unchecked, he projected his thoughts outward so clearly that any Force adept on the island could have seen them all. She was simply answering his regrets that he has not yet formed into words. "She collapsed on the Senate floor. She was gone before anyone could do anything."

Princess of Alderaan, daughter of Anakin Skywalker, senator, Alliance and later Resistance leader, with all of those titles, she was supposed to be immortal. She was supposed to live forever, or at least longer than his own pitiful existence, and she certain wasn't supposed to die from natural causes. Growing up an only child, he'd always competed with the Senate for her attention. In a way, it had always been his older sibling that she had loved and cherished. He couldn't help but feel the jealously yet again that had wormed its way into his heart as a child. But at least she didn't die alone. That he could take comfort in.

Ben broke the embrace and looked up at Rey. Without saying a word, she cupped his cheek with one hand and thumbed away a stray tear. "It was fast," she said. "She didn't feel any pain."

Without saying another word, she helped him to his feet. Reaching out with the Force, she raised the Falcon's ramp and called her bag to her hand. "Let's go inside," she whispered, her hand gently guiding him at the small of his back. "It's cold out here."

He silently acquiesced and allowed her to lead him back to the house and to the waiting couch. Rey quickly restarted the fire and put the kettle on the stove to prepare tea. She knew where everything was in his tiny kitchen and even remembered to add sugar and an extra pellet of instacream to his cup.

He wordlessly nodded his thanks as she placed the steaming mug in his hand and sat beside him on the couch. It was too hot to drink, and he set it on the small table resting in front of them. He didn't have the heart to tell her he wasn't in the mood for tea.

"They're planning a memorial in three days," Rey explained. "They're waiting for Master Luke to arrive."

Ben nodded again. A quiet understanding passed through him. It was a ceremony he was to have no part with an uncle he still did not deserve to see. The rift between them was still too great. And even though the Jedi was more than willing to offer his forgiveness, it was one gift that Ben was not quite ready to seek.

"If it's okay with you, I'd just as soon stay here instead," she added.

Ben tried to smile but couldn't. "That's really kind of you," he answered, "but it's not necessary. Go and be with your friends. It's what she would've wanted."

Rey shook her head and replied, "She wouldn't want you to be alone."

She dug into the pocket of her vest and retrieved something. Placing it in the palm of his hand, she closed his fingers around the object and said, "This is what she would've wanted."

Ben opened his hand to find his mother's ring resting in his palm, two blue moonstones that his mother had once told him reminded her of the crystal blue seas on Alderaan. His father had given it to her a lifetime ago, and she had worn it every day since then. A stone for each of her Solo men, she'd explained when he was little. It was her way of carrying them both with her everywhere she went. The gold band was now weathered and worn, and there was imperceivably small crack in one of the stones.

"Thank you," was all he could manage to say.

He closed his eyes and focused on the ring. For a moment he thought he could hear his parents' laughter from a happier time, before his world had gone to hell, before he'd turned his back on them as young man, before he stood on a bridge with his aged father and made the biggest mistake of his life.

Tears prickled at the corner of his eyes as he opened them once again, but Ben was certain he had no more tears to shed. There were so many moments in his life that he wanted back, that he naively wished he could change. But all that remained was a weathered ring and an absolution delivered in a mother's embrace a year before.

"Do you think she's with my da now?" he quietly asked.

"I thought you didn't believe in such things anymore," Rey answered. She was well aware that he had turned his back on the Force.

"I don't know," he admitted. His uncle had once said there was no death, there was just the Force and had spoken of how he'd conversed with his own teachers and even after they had passed onto another plane of existence. But Ben had called to his grandfather more times than he could count, prayed for to him for guidance, but he had never appeared. But if there was such a thing as an afterlife, he could not think of two people more deserving to find each other. "I would like to think that they are together again, and that they're happy."

It took both of Rey's hands to cover his. Giving it a gentle squeeze, she answered, "So would I."

He swallowed hard once and confessed, "I never stopped loving her. It was the one thing I was able to hide from Snoke. He was in my mind constantly, clawing and prying. But that was one thing he could not find. It was that pull to the Light that I never, never surrendered to him."

Drawing in a ragged breath, he struggled to maintain his composure. His head pounded and the fatigue he'd been ignoring for the past day had finally caught up with him. Ben was emotionally and physically spent. "The saddest thing is," he added, "I don't think I ever told her that."

"She knew, Ben," Rey said as he leaned into her for support. "It's why she never lost her faith in you."

ooooo

Later that night Ben woke beside Rey in their bed. He didn't bother to check the time. His internal chrono told him it was still several hours before sunrise. The clouds had cleared and a pale stream of moonlight shone through the window.

Normally they'd mark her return to Maluhia by retreating to his bedroom in the loft upstairs and making love well into the night, but earlier tonight he had nearly been asleep by the time his head had hit the pillow. Emotionally drained, he had found comfort simply by letting her hold him as he had drifted to sleep.

But now he was wide awake, alone with his thoughts as Rey dozed beside him in one of his faded t-shirts. She mumbled something wordlessly and rolled over as he sat up, put his feet on the wooden floor and smoothed out his sleep pants. His mother ring rested on his bedside table. He had no idea what he was going to do with it, but it had immediately become his most prized possession.

The moonlight from the window called to him, and for a fleeting second he thought of closing the blind and ignoring its beckoning call. He could've sworn he had heard his parents' laughter again. He was either losing his mind or he was the only one who had heard it. Glancing at Rey, she didn't stir from her slumber.

Finally he gave in to his curiosity and pulled himself to a stand and padded his way quietly to the window.

There she was on the snow-covered path leading to the lake. His mother stood there smiling up at him in hooded white gown he'd never seen her wear, an ephemeral being made of nothing more than a shimmering pale blue light. She glanced over at the woods lining the path and watched as his father exited the woods to join her. They were both younger than they had been when he'd last seem them each. The looked like the age they were when things were much simpler—before he'd been sent to his uncle, before Snoke.

They were happy, and they were together. His father leaned over and pressed a kiss into his mother's temple before wrapping his arm around her.

Ben didn't fight the silent tears that streamed down his cheeks as his father looked up toward him and silently waved.

It was through the Force that he felt it. As much as he wanted to reject it, it was offering him a gift that he wanted more than anything in the galaxy. He felt their love surround him and their forgiveness fill him as strongly as if they had been standing right there with him in his bedroom. It made the pain of their loss just a little easier to bear.

Ben gently pressed his fingertips against the glass as if he was reaching out to touch them. "Thank you," he whispered as they smiled back.

The gazed back at him for several moments before they turned and headed toward the lake hand-in-hand. As the slipped into further into the path's shadows, he tried his best to commit every part of their image to memory.

"I love you," he quietly said as he closed his eyes as the last of that shimmering light faded away. "I'll see you again someday."

His parents were one with the Force, and the perhaps for the first time in his life the peaceful embrace of the Force was with him.


End file.
